It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

I stood face to face with the moon and the ocean and the future that spread out with all its bewildering immensity before me.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

Some things don’t mix. Some things don’t mix at all, but sometimes in life you have to take the risk.

I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

But no one walks out of his family without reprisals: a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

A family is one of nature's solubles; it dissolves in time like salt in rainwater.

But even her demons she invested with inordinate beauty, consecrated them with the dignity of her attention.

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

There is no teacher more discriminating or transforming than loss.

She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.

Man wonders but God decides When to kill the Prince of Tides.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

Anyone who knows me well must understand and be sympathetic to my genuine need to be my own greatest hero. It is not a flaw of character; it is a catastrophe.

These are the quicksilver moments of my childhood I cannot remember entirely. Irresistible and emblematic, I can recall them only in fragments and shivers of the heart.

Her laughter was a shiny thing, like pewter flung high in the air.

We set down feasts for each other and treated our love with tongues of fire. Our bodies were fields of wonder to us.